Angela Grauerholz

La femme 100 têtes / The Hundred Headless Woman presents over 150 portraits of 100 women_some acquaintances, some strangers_taken by Angela Grauerholz over a 30-year period and presented for the first time in this book. Collaging diverse photos made with various cameras and technologies with text fragments from a range of mostly female authors, Grauerholz creates a hybrid between a magazine and book that forms a complex portrait of women. The title La femme 100 têtes is borrowed from Max Ernst_s 1929 Surrealist collage novel of the same name, in which he combined cut-up and reassembled nineteenth-century illustrations with bizarre captions. Grauerholz welcomes the double entendre of Ernst_s title_when read aloud in French it means both the hundred-headed woman and the headless woman__to create a sense of womanhood intricately individual and violently anonymous. The intentionally quotidian nature of Grauerholz_s photos blurs the _class distinctions between images in an art context, in a printed publication and on the Internet, and tests the changing ways we encounter and judge photography. Apprehending the face_s image becomes a mode of possession. We are surrounded by the image of the woman_s face, the obsession of the portrait and the covergirl alike. The face is what belongs to the other. It is unavailable to the woman herself. Susan Stewar